Our People

Dr. Frank Peters was born in Victoria, B.C. Canada. In 1988 he completed a B.Eng. in engineering physics at the Technical University of Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1991 he completed a Ph.D. from McMaster University, Canada.

Frank is a Professor in the Physics Department of University College Cork, and leads the Integrated Photonic Group at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland. He was previously based in California working as a research scientist in various companies including Agilent Technologies and Infinera, where he contributed to the development of the first commercial photonic integrated circuits (PICs). After nearly 15 years of photonic research experience, he joined UCC and Tyndall in 2005. Professor. Peters continues to research in high speed and integrated photonic devices. He directed the Strategic Research Cluster: Photonic Integration from atoms to systems (PiFAS) from 2007-2013. Currently, he leads the wide area networks strand in the Irish Photonic Integration Centre (I-PIC) and is the Photonics Strand leader for the CTVR2, two large centres for Science Engineering and Technology funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

Additional Interests:

While pursuing research in high speed and integrated photonic circuits, Frank likes to apply C++ based object oriented programming techniques to help solve problems in Photonics. This work initially produced a commercial software package – Vertical, which is still used by companies who develop vertical cavity lasers. Currently Frank and his research group are developing code for the rapid design development of complex photonic integrated circuits. Included components are: finite element and finite difference mode solvers, custom beam propagation code in 2D and 3D, band solvers for the quantum confined stark effect, edge emitting laser simulators and optimisation tools for photonic integrated components such as MMIs, AWGs and Echelle grating. Finally, the codes writes GDS2 files for the fabrication of the photonic circuits.